A Cross of Gold:
William Jennings Bryan
“The armor of a righteous cause”
(Political Science 110EB)
Second Inaugural
• “The prayers of both could not be answered;
that of neither has been answered fully. The
Almighty has his own purposes.”
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God the major actor in the drama of the war
Both sides could not win
Neither side has truly gotten what it wanted
God’s will over all history, distinct from human plans
and desires
– Humans rendered equal in this way
2
Second Inaugural
• ‘Woe unto the world because of offences! for
it must needs be that offences come; but woe
to that man by whom the offence cometh!’
– Matt. 18:7
• God’s will controls history, nothing can go
against the will of God.
– Yet individuals remain responsible for their sins
3
Second Inaugural
• “If we shall suppose that American Slavery is
once of those offences which, in the Providence
of God, must needs come, but which having
continued through His appointed time, He now
wills to remove, and that He gives to both North
and South this terrible war, as the woe due those
by whom the offense came, shall we discern
therein any departure from those divine
attributes which the believers in a Living God
always ascribe to Him?”
4
Second Inaugural
• “American” Slavery was
– An offence to God
– Allowed by God
– Willed by God to end now
• North and South equally guilty before God,
though not before humans
– Divine justice vs. human justice
– Perfection a dichotomous variable
5
Second Inaugural
• “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this
mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.”
– Humans can do nothing to alter God’s will. They must humble
themselves and pray that God’s mercy is greater than his justice
– Distilling moral & religious meaning from the bewildering events
and destruction of the War
• Shared moral community of Americans
– Both guilty in their shared failure to uphold equality
– Both powerless to resist the will of God
• Transcendence of God
– Not some tribal deity
– His justice and purposes are very much different from those of
humans.
6
Second Inaugural
• “Yet if God wills that it continue until all the
wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred
and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk,
and until every drop of blood drawn with the
lash shall be paid by another drawn with the
sword, as was said three thousand years ago,
so still must it be said ‘the judgments of the
Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’”
7
Second Inaugural
• The US is guilty enough to deserve destruction
– Slavery a mortal transgression against American
obligation to equality
– Affirms the perfection of divine justice over human
claims to justice
– Though the justice of God is inscrutable, it is
nonetheless perfectly just
• “three thousand years ago”: these ideas predate
the US, & may outlast them by as much
• Just as the war is not the product of human
agency, neither will be its end
8
Second Inaugural
• The judgments of the Lord
– Psalm 19
– Lincoln must somehow act ethically
• within a context beyond his comprehension
• with outcomes that are impossible to firmly predict
• and be judged by the inscrutable mind of God
according to standards that he cannot fully understand
•  humility as political good
9
Second Inaugural
• “With malice toward none; with charity for all;
with firmness in the right, as God gives us to
see the right, let us strive on to finish the work
we are in”
– Forgiveness motivated by recognition of moral
equality
– Act firmly in the right, as God gives us to see it
• Moral conviction & moral humility
10
Second Inaugural
• “to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who
shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his
orphan—to do all which may achieve a just and a
lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
– Atonement between North & South
– Atonement between America & its God
– Political humility: don’t strive for utopia, strive for a better
world
– Equality demonstrated in a commitment to alleviated
suffering
– Care for widows & orphans a condition of minimal justice
in the Bible
11
Second Inaugural
• March 15, 1865
• “Men are not flattered by being shown that there has
been a difference of purpose between the Almighty
and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny
that there is a God governing the world.”
– If God is always on your side, is he really there?
• “It is a truth which I thought needed to be told; and as
whatever there is of humiliation there is in it, falls most
directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me
to tell it.”
– Why does the humiliation fall most directly on him?
12
13
Long-term outcomes
of the Civil War
• Federal government decisively rendered
superior to state governments
• Blacks being citizens, racial equality becomes
civil rights issue
• Necessities of war lead to dramatic expansion,
bureaucratization of federal gov’t
• Push to homogenize law across states
• Expanded power of corporations, closer ties to
government
14
William Jennings Bryan
• Lawyer
• Populist orator, the Great Commoner
– Spoke for the rural people of the midwest & west,
massively popular
• Democratic presidential nominee 1896, 1900 and
1908
• Peace activist & anti-imperialist
• Wilson’s Secretary of State
• Scopes Trial
– Bryan vs. Clarence Darrow
Bryan
• The money question: should the dollar be backed by gold or by
silver?
– Major issue in late-19th C. American politics
• Gold: stable, “Sound Money”
– Backed by the banks, industry, landlords
• Silver: inflationary, “Free Silver”
– Backed by debtors, farmers, workers
• Themes of the ‘Cross of Gold’ speech
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Equality
The people = farmers, laborers
The State should serve & protect the people
America belongs to the common people, not to elites
Major business interests are capturing the government
• I would be presumptuous, indeed, to present myself
against the distinguished gentlemen to whom you have
listened if this were a mere measuring of abilities; but
this is not a contest between persons. The humblest
citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a
righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. I
come to speak to you in defence of a cause as holy as
the cause of liberty—the cause of humanity.
– The cause of the masses is the cause of all human beings
– Moral righteousness above all
• “With a zeal approaching the zeal which inspired the crusaders who
followed Peter the Hermit, our silver Democrats went forth from
victory unto victory until they are now assembled, not to discuss,
not to debate, but to enter up the judgment already rendered by
the plain people of this country. In this contest brother has been
arrayed against brother, father against son.
– The warmest ties of love, acquaintance, and association have been
disregarded; old leaders have been cast aside when they have refused
to give expression to the sentiments of those whom they would lead,
and new leaders have sprung up to give direction to this cause of
truth. Thus has the contest been waged, and we have assembled here
under as binding and solemn instructions as were ever imposed upon
representatives of the people.”
• Crusade, believers vs. unbelievers
• We do not come as individuals. As individuals we
might have been glad to compliment the
gentleman from New York [Senator Hill], but we
know that the people for whom we speak would
never be willing to put him in a position where he
could thwart the will of the Democratic party. I
say it was not a question of persons; it was a
question of principle, and it is not with gladness,
my friends, that we find ourselves brought into
conflict with those who are now arrayed on the
other side.
– A conflict not over policy, but between good & evi
Bryan
• “We object to bringing this question down to the level of
persons. The individual is but an atom; he is born, he acts,
he dies; but principles are eternal; and this has been a
contest over a principle.”
– A matter of ideals, which are more important than even life
• Equality
– To the charge that silver will disrupt business, “We say to you
that you have made the definition of a business man too limited
in its application. The man who is employed for wages is as
much a business man as his employer; the attorney in a country
town is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a
great metropolis”
• Power in language
Bryan
• To whom does America belong? To "the idle holders of idle capital”
or to "the struggling masses, who produce the wealth and pay the
taxes of the country”?
– What is here the appropriate role of government intervention? On
whose behalf should it act? To whom does it belong?
• “There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe
that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous,
their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic
idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses
prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class
which rests upon them.”
– for Bryan that the state should act to preserve and protect those who
are the most numerous and at the same time most vulnerable.
Bryan
• “You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in
favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great
cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn
down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities
will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our
farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every
city in the country.”
• The rural people are the base of the American way of
life
– Morally
– Economically
• The producer of wealth seen as prior to the aggregator of wealth
• A matter of justice
Bryan
• Our ancestors, when but three millions in number, had
the courage to declare their political independence of
every other nation; shall we, their descendants, when
we have grown to seventy millions, declare that we are
less independent than our forefathers? [...]
– Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and
the world, supported by the commercial interests, the
laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will
answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to
them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor
this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a
cross of gold.
• What is called to mind by this imagery?
Scopes
• Let me, in the first place, congratulate our cause that circumstances
have committed the trial to a community like this and entrusted the
decision to a jury made up largely of the yeomanry of the state.
– Virtue of the agrarian masses
• “This is not an interference with freedom of conscience. A teacher
can think as he pleases and worship God as he likes, or refuse to
worship God at all.”
– Issue is not with the individual, but with his function as public servant
• The “state can direct what shall be taught and also forbid the
teaching of anything ‘manifestly inimical to the public welfare.’” (1)
– What is the public welfare? Who decides?
– How much influence should the community have over the education
of its children?
• Science has brought many useful & beneficial things to
modern life, and “Christianity welcomes truth from
whatever source it comes, and is not afraid that any real
truth from any source can interfere with the divine truth
that comes by inspiration from God Himself.”
– But: “Evolution is not truth; it is merely an hypothesis—it is
millions of guesses strung together.” (3)
• Bryan’s claim here rests on a misunderstanding of the
scientific term “theory”
– A scientific theory is a hypothesis that has been tested many
times and has a large amount of evidence to support it
• Functionally factual
• Newton
Separation of Church & State
• The “evolutionary hypothesis, carried to its logical
conclusion, disputes every vital truth of the Bible. Its
tendency, natural, if not inevitable, is to lead those who
really accept it, first to agnosticism and then to atheism.
– Darwin “drags man down to the brute level, and then, judging
man by brute standards, he questions whether man’s mind can
be trusted to deal with God and immortality? How can any
teacher tell his students that evolution does not tend to destroy
his religious faith?” (5-6)
• “Christians must, in every state of the Union, build their
own colleges in which to teach Christianity; it is only simple
justice that atheists, agnostics and unbelievers should build
their own colleges if they want to teach their own religious
views or attack the religious views of others.” (2)
• “Do bad doctrines corrupt the morals of students? We have a case in
point. Mr. Darrow, [and lead attorney for the defense] one of the most
distinguished criminal lawyers in our land, was engaged about a year ago
in defending two rich men’s sons who were on trial for as dastardly a
murder as was ever committed.”
• Leopold & Loeb, 1924
• Nathan Leopold had been an enthusiastic reader of Nietzsche, Beyond
Good and Evil
– Darrow’s defense: “Is there any blame attached because somebody took
Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it?[..] Then who is
to blame? The university would be more to blame than he is; the scholars of
the world would be more to blame than he is. The publishers of the world are
more to blame than he is. Your Honor, it is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old
boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university.”
• For Bryan, this exactly supports his argument that a belief in the atheistic
dominance of the strongest leads to violence and depravity (8-9)
• Darrow defense Richard Loeb: “I do not know
what remote ancestor may have sent down the
seed that corrupted him, and I do not know
through how many ancestors it may have passed
until it reached Dickey Loeb. All I know is, it is
true, and there is not a biologist in the world who
will not say I am right.”
– Bryan: “That doctrine is as deadly as leprosy; it may
aid a lawyer in a criminal case, but it would, if
generally adopted, destroy all sense of responsibiity
[sic] and menace the morals of the world.” (10)
• Evolution teaches that change can occur only
over millions of years, stifling hopes for
change today
– “Its only program for man is scientific breeding, a
system under which a few supposedly superior
intellects, self-appointed, would direct the mating
and the movements of the mass of mankind—an
impossible system!” (11)
• Eugenics
• Darwin: “The weak members of civilized society propagate
their kind [via vaccinations, asylums, poor laws]. No one
who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will
doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”
– “The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly
an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was
originally acquired as part of the social instincts”
• Bryan: “All of the sympathetic activities of civilized society
are condemned because they enable “the weak members
to propagate their kind.” Then he drags mankind down to
the level of the brute and compares the freedom given to
man unfavorably with the restraint that we put on barnyard
beasts.” (12)
– Evolution erodes Christian pity & solidarity
• Evolution, “if taken seriously and made the basis
of a philosophy of life, it would eliminate love and
carry man back to a struggle of tooth and claw.”
(12)
• “What else can the spirit of evolution can account
for the popularity of the selfish doctrine, ‘Each
one for himself, and the devil take the hindmost,’
that threatens the very existence of the doctrine
of brotherhood.” (14)
– Embracing evolution will not only enable capitalist
competition & exploitation, but legitimate it as
morally good.
• “In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war
more terrible than it ever was before.”
– It has given us planes and submarines, “but science does not teach
brotherly love. Science has made war so hellish that civilization was
about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered
instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war
seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in
the future.
• If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by
intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral
code of the meek and lowly Nazarene.”
• “The world needs a savior more than it ever did before.” (14)
– The eroding of Christianity will unleash powers of exploitation and
destruction
• “Again force and love meet face to face, and the question, “What
shall I do with Jesus?” must be answered.” (15)